Punk, or why I don’t stream anymore

朋克，或者为什么我不再直播了

If you’re the sun, I’m a black hole – The Stephen Hawking, Say Anything. What killed the hacker culture I grew up in was spectacle. You can consume it without participating, and even worse it has signaling value. I never did CTFs to put them on my resume. I don’t even have a resume I take seriously. Just a battle between me and a machine and the glorification of my ego, sometimes public, but never performative. There was no purpose beyond the thing.

如果你是太阳，我就是黑洞——《Say Anything》中的斯蒂芬·霍金。扼杀了我所成长的黑客文化的，是“奇观”。你可以不参与其中就消费它，更糟糕的是，它还具有某种“信号价值”。我参加夺旗赛（CTF）从来不是为了把它写进简历。我甚至没有一份当真的简历。那只是我和机器之间的一场博弈，是对我自我的某种升华，有时是公开的，但绝不是表演性的。除了这件事本身，别无他求。

The streams by their nature became no longer any truthful reflection of self, just a prediction of what you want on them, and you can’t stop this because we are permeable. I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person. There are no rough edges, it’s basically marketing copy. Reflected back and forth in their heads with this “society” mirror so many times that there’s no identity or coherence left, just a mush of diffuse monochrome light.

直播的本质决定了它不再是对自我的真实反映，而仅仅是对观众期待的预测。你无法阻止这一点，因为我们是易受渗透的。我一直在抓取约会网站的数据并喂给 ChatGPT，令人惊讶的是，几乎没有多少个人资料能反映出真实的人。没有棱角，全是营销文案。在“社会”这面镜子中反复折射，以至于不再有身份或连贯性，只剩下一团弥散的单色光。

The streams are wireheading, aka ‘felt completion without world contact.’ You watch and you feel a version of what I feel. But the difference is that you didn’t do anything. And in so much as there is a you, it isn’t steering. Now I realize that the non steering you is everywhere. I’d say they still claim they are people, but I’m not totally sure they would. AI is making this all so much worse. When you are prompting you feel like you are steering, but are you really? Would you know if you weren’t?

直播就是“电极刺激”（wireheading），即“无需接触现实就能感受到的满足感”。你看着直播，感受着我所感受到的某种版本。但区别在于，你什么都没做。如果说还有一个“你”存在，那它也并没有在掌舵。现在我意识到，这种“不掌舵的你”无处不在。我想他们可能还会声称自己是人，但我不太确定他们是否真的这么认为。人工智能让这一切变得更糟。当你输入提示词时，你觉得自己是在掌舵，但你真的在吗？如果不在，你能察觉吗？

I love analysis YouTube videos but it’s really the same thing and I need to stop. Your food is prechewed for you. The caged tiger prefers a pot of meat slop to an antelope they have to chase. And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world. Isolation is basically impossible because the Internet follows you everywhere. And it’s perfectly uniform, there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese.

我喜欢看 YouTube 上的分析视频，但其实也是一回事，我得戒掉。你的食物是别人嚼碎了喂给你的。笼中的老虎宁愿吃一盆肉糊，也不愿去追逐羚羊。而且，你也没地方可去。现实世界就是商业街、投斧馆和密室逃脱。天哪，人们竟然在 Hinge 上约会去投斧，还以为这就是现实世界。孤独几乎是不可能的，因为互联网如影随形。而且它是完全统一的，没有别的互联网，只有五个企业巨头统治的城镇，还有一些如果你不懂中文就很难进入的中国互联网空间。

I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app. You can’t isolate in that old world, because the old world doesn’t exist. It was outcompeted. The normal strategies you have against this won’t work. They didn’t take away the thing, they built an awful cancerous version of it that outcompetes yours. The early pickup stuff was so good, then you get the transition with Roosh and now you all get the Andrew Tate you deserve.

我曾试过用翻盖手机（2014年），但你查不到电影放映时间，因为电影电话服务只会把你重定向到他们的 App。你无法在那个旧世界里寻求孤立，因为旧世界已经不存在了。它在竞争中被淘汰了。你用来对抗这一切的常规策略根本没用。他们没有夺走那个东西，他们只是造了一个糟糕的、癌变的版本，并以此击败了你的版本。早期的搭讪艺术（pickup）曾那么好，后来经历了 Roosh 的转型，现在你们得到了你们应得的 Andrew Tate。

Man I wish tattoos still made you unemployable then I’d go get some. Maybe the new tattoos are just like being racist or something, but that’s hard to do when your heart isn’t in it and they will eventually find some way to absorb that. The machine takes your culture and sells a shitty version of it back to you. I don’t think I’m properly capturing the scope of the machine. First you build the fence to keep the animals out then you build the fence to keep the animals in. It’s a Fullmetal Alchemist homunculus maybe it has already eaten your soul.

伙计，我真希望纹身还能让你找不到工作，那样我就去纹几个。也许现在的纹身就像种族歧视之类的东西，但如果你心里不认同，就很难做到，而且他们最终总会找到某种方式来吸收这些东西。机器夺走你的文化，再把一个烂版本卖回给你。我觉得我还没完全描述出这台机器的规模。起初你筑起围栏是为了把野兽挡在外面，后来你筑起围栏是为了把野兽关在里面。这就像《钢之炼金术师》里的人造人，也许它已经吞噬了你的灵魂。

I don’t really see how this gets better, I just know that everything eventually ends. But it was never the terminator you had to worry about, it was the price required to create the philosopher’s stone. You won’t be killed by bullets, you’ll be transmuted into compatible material. ChatGPT told me to end it there. I’m still smarter than it, but by less and less each year. I really am excited to see what happens, I don’t think it’s what a lot of people think. The SF takes are so hilariously out of touch, it will actually be them who AI eats first, so there will be some schadenfreude in that, but then we are all still here.

我看不出这事儿怎么能变好，我只知道万物终有尽头。但你真正需要担心的从来不是终结者，而是炼制贤者之石所付出的代价。你不会死于子弹，你会被炼化成兼容的材料。ChatGPT 让我在这里结束。我依然比它聪明，但每年的差距都在缩小。我真的很期待看到接下来会发生什么，我不认为那是大多数人所想的那样。那些科幻式的观点简直荒谬地脱离现实，AI 最先吃掉的其实会是他们，这倒会让我有一点幸灾乐祸，但归根结底，我们都还在这里。

After the revolution, there’s reconstruction. A reminder that most revolutions suck balls and make things worse, you just remember the good ones. And this revolution isn’t AI, AI is just the atomic bomb of a brutal information war that’s been raging for decades. We aren’t going to get the World Wars, they were products of the Industrial Revolution. They only wanted your body, not your soul. The new war demands your inner reality. The new war will be weird in all sorts of new ways we can’t even imagine yet. lol remember all the idiots who said we were at the end of history?

革命之后是重建。提醒一下，大多数革命都烂透了，只会让事情变得更糟，你只是记住了那些好的革命。而这场革命并不是 AI，AI 只是这场已经持续了几十年的残酷信息战中的原子弹。我们不会再经历那种世界大战了，那是工业革命的产物。它们只想要你的身体，而不是你的灵魂。这场新战争索要的是你的内在现实。这场新战争将以各种我们目前无法想象的方式变得诡异。哈哈，还记得那些说我们处于“历史终结”的白痴吗？